Yesterday, Google’s official blog declared, “Today we’re launching our first-ever vertical Street View collection, giving you the opportunity to climb 3,000 feet up the world’s most famous rock wall: Yosemite’s El Capitan. To bring you this new imagery, we partnered with legendary climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell.” Above, you can see this trio in action, talking about what makes El Cap a mecca for rock climbers everywhere.
To create this Street View of El Capitan, Hill, Honnold and Caldwell worked with Google engineers to figure out how to haul a camera up this sheer rock face. And what you ultimately get are some amazing 360-degree panoramic images. According to Caldwell, these “are the closest thing I’ve ever witnessed to actually being thousands of feet up a vertical rock face—better than any video or photo.” Which, hating heights, is good enough for me.
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The Bureau “opened schools to educate the illiterate, managed hospitals, rationed food and clothing for the destitute, and even solemnized marriages.” And, along the way, the Bureau gathered handwritten records on roughly 4 million African Americans. Now, those documents are being digitized with the help of volunteers, and, by the end of 2016, they will be made available in a searchable database at discoverfreedmen.org.
According to Hollis Gentry, a Smithsonian genealogist, this archive “will give African Americans the ability to explore some of the earliest records detailing people who were formerly enslaved,” finally giving us a sense “of their voice, their dreams.”
Is sociology an art or a science? Is it philosophy? Social psychology? Economics and political theory? Surveying the great sociologists since the mid-19th century, one would have to answer “yes” to all of these questions. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno conducted serious scholarly and social-scientific analyses, and wrote highly speculative theory. Though it may seem like we’re all sociologists now, making critical judgments about large groups of people, the sociologists who created and carried on the discipline generally did so with sound evidence and well-reasoned argument. Unlike so much current knee-jerk commentary, even when they’re wrong they’re still well worth reading.
Having already surveyed Marx in his series on Euro-American political philosophers, School of Life founder Alain de Botton now tackles the other three illustrious names on the list above, starting with Durkheim at the top, then Weber above, and Adorno below. The first two figures were contemporaries of Marx, the third a later interpreter. Like that bearded German scourge of capitalism, these three—in more measured or pessimistic ways—levied critiques against the dominant economic system. Durkheim took on the problem of suicide, Weber the anxious religious underpinnings of capitalist ideology, and Adorno the consumer culture of instant gratification.
That’s so far, at least, as de Botton’s very cursory introductions get us. As with his other series, this one more or less ropes the thinkers represented here into the School of Life’s program of promoting a very particular, middle class view of happiness. And, as with the other series, the thinkers surveyed here all seem to more or less agree with de Botton’s own views. Perhaps others who most certainly could have been included, like W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, or Hannah Arendt, would offer some very different perspectives.
De Botton again makes his points with pithy generalizations, numbered lists, and quirky, cut-out animations, breezily reducing lifetimes of work to a few observations and moral lessons. I doubt Adorno would approach these less-than-rigorous methods charitably, but those new to the field of sociology or the work of its practitioners will find here some tantalizing ideas that will hopefully inspire them to dig deeper, and to perhaps improve their own sociological diagnoses.
“There is nothing intrinsically imaginative about the idea of ‘gold,’ nor the idea of ‘mountain,’” writes Will Self, citing an idea of the philosopher David Hume, “but join them together and you have a fantastically gleaming ‘gold mountain.’ And might not that gold mountain be the Laurenziberg in Prague? After all, it looms over contemporary Prague just as it loomed in the consciousness of Franz Kafka, whose earliest surviving narrative fragment, ‘Description of a Struggle,’ is in part an account of a phantasmagorical ascent of its slopes.”
This association comes from “Kafka’s Wound,” Will Self’s new essay in the London Review of Books — or rather, a new “digital essay” from the LRB on the BBC and Arts Council England’s new site The Space, one which takes full advantage of the multimedia future, much enthused over back in the 1990s, in which we now find ourselves. For some readers, myself included, the association of the author of TheMetamorphosis and The Trial with Hume, the author of so many volumes fictional, nonfictional, and psychogeographical (find some in our collection of Free Philosophy eBooks), constitutes reason enough to minimize all other windows and get reading.
But Self has taken on an even more ambitious project than that: the mind-mappish interface of “Kafka’s Wound” offers a wealth of audio, video, and other textual material to supplement the experience of the main text, all of which connects in some way to the essay’s subject: Will Self’s “personal relationship to Kafka’s work through the lens of the short story ‘A Country Doctor’ (1919), and in particular through the aperture of the wound described in that story.” Self’s own site describes the essay as “ ‘through composed’ with Will’s own thoughts, as he works, being responded to by digital-content providers,” with more of that content to come through July.
The environment internet, which facilitates our natural tendency to drift from subject to at least semi-related subject with an addictive vengeance, encourages associational thinking. But so do cities, as a psychogeographer like Will Self knows full well. And so part of this rich literary investigation takes the form of an hourlong documentary (click here or the image above to view), in which Self takes a walking tour of Kafka’s Prague, seeking out the writer’s “genius loci,” the sites that gave settings to the milestones of his life and shape to his artistic and intellectual sensibilities. He also takes the opportunity to do a Kafka reading right there in Kafka’s hometown. It’s one thing to read Kafka with the Laurenziberg in mind, but still quite another to do it with the Laurenziberg in sight.
You can read the story free online here (if you haven’t exceeded the monthly quota of The New Yorker’s paywall). Or, if you’re more visual, you can watch an animated adaptation of the story above. Directed by Gur Bentwich and animated by Ofra Kobliner, the video was produced by Storyvid, a nonprofit production company that aspires to create “the literary equivalent of a music video.”
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So it turns out that my two-year old son might be qualified for a professorship at an elite university. No, he’s not some Doogie Howser-style savant. He just really likes Legos. And Cambridge University – the school of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking – has announced that it’s getting ready to create a Lego professorship this fall.
The position, which is slated to start in October 2015, came about following a £4 million donation from the Lego Foundation. The Denmark-based organization, which owns 25% of the Lego toy company, states that their mission is to “make children’s lives better — and communities stronger — by making sure the fundamental value of play is understood, embraced and acted upon.” The Foundation already has ties with MIT and Tsinghua University in China, among others.
Who ever lands the professorship will also head the Research Centre on Play in Education, Development and Learning and will explore the connection between learning and play.
The qualifications for the job seem remarkably broad. As the university says: “The candidature should be open to all those whose work falls within the general field of the title of the office.” They don’t, however, specifically mention that candidates have to be potty trained. I’m getting my son’s resume ready.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Cinema Sem Lei has made a nice supercut video essay that explores the influence of German Expressionism on the films of Tim Burton. There’s undeniably some direct quotes: The first shot comparing the cityscapes of Metropolis and Batman Returns, the shadows on the wall of both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Corpse Bride, and the similarities in the haircuts of Metropolis’ Rotwang and Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck (the name a tribute to the title actor in Nosferatu) again in Batman Returns. (Beetlejuice is notoriously absent.)
But there’s also a sense that Cinema Sem Lei’s video is cutting off a crab’s legs to make it fit in a box. Not everything in Burton’s films has a direct link to German Expressionism, and to do so is to pretend that this silent movie style lie dormant between the 1920s and 1982, when Burton created his first animated short, Vincent. (Watch it here.) It’s to ignore that Burton most likely got his Expressionism, like many other ’80s filmmakers, second and third hand.
German Expressionism didn’t result in that many films, but the ones that did have become famous for their visionary aesthetic, standing out visually and intellectually against the other films of the day. When many of its directors fled the Nazis and moved to Hollywood, the style began to influence horror movies and film noir. One other place where Expressionism popped up was in the animated films of Warner Brothers, Disney, and MGM, something Burton definitely grew up watching. The comic exaggerations in Tex Avery are nothing but expressionist, and the design of both the desert vistas of Chuck Jones’ Road Runner films, and his wild sci-fi designs bear the distortions of Caligari’s sets.
So while we can see the angled rooftops and spindly stairs of Caligari in the shot of Burton’s Vincent sulkily climbing the stairs to his room, a more direct influence was the art of Dr. Seuss, and while a skeleton might play a bone as a flute in Murnau’s Faust, it’s Burton’s childhood love of Ray Harryhausen that you can see in the skeleton band from Corpse Bride.
Also, it’s not known when Burton may have seen these classic silent films. Growing up in the ‘70s he would have had to seek out prints, or look at stills in books about the history of horror. Once he got to CalArts to study, his access to films would have expanded beyond what was on television.
But it’s interesting that in most interviews, Burton quickly diverts the discussion if and rarely when asked about German Expressionism, but indulges when asked about what he watched as a child.
Once working in the film industry, no doubt those Burton brought on for his art directors and costume designers came with their own knowledge of history, while music videos in the early ‘80s were also awash with Expressionistinfluence mixed with modernist design. Not to say that Burton isn’t a singular visionary with a stack of influences, but one who had grown up lonely, he soon found himself among many who shared his particular tastes, the film production as a second family.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Every period of literary history has its share of bawdy, satirical poetry, from Mesopotamia, to Rome, to the age of Jonathan Swift. Every period, it often seems, but one: The late Victorian era in England and America often appears to us like a dry, humorless time for English poetry. Two of the most renowned poets, Alfred Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are, fairly or unfairly, viewed as wordy, sentimental, and didactic. At the dawn of the new century, tough-minded modernists like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot remedied these failings, the story goes. And yet, despite their symbolist influences, these would-be radicals can seem themselves pretty conservative, turning Tennyson and Wadsworth’s affirmations of an ordered world into maudlin, and reactionary, laments over its loss.
Eliot’s work is especially characteristic of this high church disdain for social change. Eliot, writes Mental Floss, was “stodgy.” Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine writes of Eliot’s “almost papal authority in the world of literature” and his “magisterial criticism”—hardly descriptions of a revolutionary. “Looking at the severe, bespectacled face of the elderly poet on the cover of his Complete Poems and Plays,” writes Kirsch, “it is hard to imagine that he was ever young.” But young he was, and while always pedantic in the most fascinating way, Eliot was also once a writer of very bawdy verse.
He was also, unfortunately, a composer of racist verse, a fact which many readers of Eliot will not find overly surprising. Mental Floss quotes from one of those ugly early works, featuring “the racist caricature of a well-endowed ruler named ‘King Bolo.’” But it also quotes from an early poem said to contain the first use of a word that aptly describes the language in that first distasteful poem. According to Language Log, a site maintained by University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman, who source their etymology from the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “bullsh*t” originated with Eliot’s poem “The Triumph of Bullsh*t.”
Wyndham Lewis first mentions the poem, which he calls a bit of “scholarly ribaldry,” in 1915, but it was probably written in 1910. With its first three stanzas addressed to “Ladies,” and all four ending with “For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass,” the poem piles up line after rhyming line of archaic, Latinate words, undercutting their obscurantism with lowbrow crudeness. The third stanza becomes more direct, less laden with clever diction, as Eliot lays out the conflict:
Ladies who think me unduly vociferous Amiable cabotin making a noise That people may cry out “this stuff is too stiff for us” - Ingenuous child with a box of new toys Toy lions carnivorous, cannons fumiferous Engines vaporous — all this will pass; Quite innocent — “he only wants to make shiver us.” For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass.
“The Triumph of Bullsh*t” functions as a bratty riposte to Eliot’s critics. (It was, in fact, originally addressed to “Critics,” then changed to “Ladies” in 1916.) Language Log questions whether Eliot “really invented bullsh*t in 1910,” since he “could hardly have aimed to shock the ‘ladies’ by naming his little poem ‘The Triumph of Bullsh*t’ if the term had not already been a commonplace vulgarity.” Perhaps. But according to Wyndham Lewis and the OED, he was the first to use the word on record. Harvard Magazine’s Kirsch calls these early poems (collected here)—and others such as the profane “Inventions of the March Hare”—the last manifestations of the “American Eliot” before he went off and became the “British Eliot” who would not deign to utter such vulgarities so freely.
The word in question never appears in the poem itself, only the title, and given the speaker’s literary chest-thumping, we might even speculate that “Bullsh*t” is a proper name, or a personification, and his triumph consists of a gleeful middle finger to Victorian decorum. It’s language only slightly more exaggerated than some of Mark Twain’s or Herman Melville’s characterizations, marking Eliot’s kinship with a particularly American sense of humor. The poet, writes Kirsch, later “buried his Americanness deep enough that it takes some digging to recognize it.” In these poems, we see it—juvenile insults, grotesque, sexualized racial caricatures, a crude defiance of tradition—and women’s opinions.… And yes, whether he invented the word or just did us the honor of popularizing it, a snide elevation of what he rightly called “bullsh*t.”
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